


Is You Is Or Is You Ain't My Baby?

by oonaseckar



Category: Hainish Cycle - Ursula K. Le Guin, RENAULT Mary - Works, Star Trek, The Charioteer - Mary Renault, The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin
Genre: Dubious Science, Hainish Cycle - Freeform, M/M, Presumed Dead, Sentimental, Star Trek - Freeform, Ursula le Guin, Vulcan, Vulcan fluff, abuse of science, firefly - Freeform, fluffy Vulcans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-17
Updated: 2015-04-17
Packaged: 2018-03-23 10:24:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3764647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oonaseckar/pseuds/oonaseckar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Laurie's a junior Star Fleet pilot in the war against the Borg, he's crashed on one of the Hainish moons of the planet Winter, and he's pretty much buggered.  Not in a good way either.  Then he's picked up by Sandy Reid, Star Fleet Medical Officer, also not in a good way.  Treated to some of the good meds, and dragged off to a Star Fleet queer party, he's having an eventful day, and war.</p>
<p>Of course, in the meantime he's been presumed dead.  So it's a bit of a surprise to his old school pash, Vulcan officer Ralph Lanyon, when he turns up onboard...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Is You Is Or Is You Ain't My Baby?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [toujours_nigel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/gifts).



> For toujoursnigel, best wishes all round and wishing you a safe and happy return to the fandom and all other outcomes as you most wish yourself. I rather think this gift fic, in reference to your exchange letter, comes under the heading, 'Write absolutely whatever you want'.
> 
> Basically a Harlequinny novelette, a serialized woman's weekly magazine romance - with added Vulcans. I really feel that there ought to be a special warning for that.
> 
> In addition to copious amounts of Star Trek and particularly Vulcans, you will also find a lot of Ursula le Guin's Hainish Federation/Cycle, a bit of Firefly and some Left Hand of Darkness. A little bit of Firefly in my life, a little bit of Ursula by my side... Because, this is important, ALL THE FUTURE SF WORLDS ALL TOGETHER ALL THE TIME.
> 
> The warnings I have included are not strictly applicable but used due to discussion of the issues involved.
> 
> In the course of research, I must note that I discovered that a villanelle is also known as a villanesque, which, huh, pretty wonderful huh? Titles that nearly happened: Schrodinger's Sweetheart, Perversely Romantic, and what the hey, Villanesque too. Maybe someday. Actual title from the Louis Armstrong song.

Actually, you _can_ stop the signal, turns out. At least, if you're a lowly tracker pilot in the war against the Borg, and you get marooned, after a battle, in a technically neutral space quadrant. Just Laurie's luck to get beached on the only known planet – since he's never even heard of it happening before – with something in the water – well, the ale, perhaps – that messes with the lifetime chronometer of his personal tracking chip. It's knocked it right down to zero. 

Just as if he was dead.

If he'd noticed while he was still on the – _extremely_ friendly and helpful – planet of Winter, then it wouldn't have mattered so much. They're neutral in the war, not technologically useful enough to be of interest to the Borg, and not on any major trade routes. And the paperwork on their admission into the Hainish alliance, which would commit them, isn't quite done yet. But his ansibular comms are active, and after one night of recovery and winding down after the skirmish, Laurie thinks, he'll get back in his craft, report to his Starfleet mothership for duty, no harm done...

Then his engine dries up over one of the planet's moons, he crashes and his comms go blank. Also his leg is injured, and he's losing blood, with insufficient nano-meds on board.

That's when he notices that he's officially, electronically dead. To be fair, that was a hell of a hangover.

And it still beats assimilation.

In the atmospheric insta-bubble from his emergency survival pack, he hunkers down and waits out his luck, to see if it'll turn. Or if he'll be the lone target of the Furies and the fates, same as always. Hugh always did say he'd provoke the wrong commanding officer one day, with batted lids and blatant, innocent come-ons: although it was understandable, since back in those dear dead dim days at the training academy, that was just after he'd tried flirting with the drill sergeant/cultural exchange tutor, Mr Spock, to see if he could get a rise out of the emotionless old droid. In the dimness of the plasta-flex of the bubble, as his rations run down, Laurie sees the blips and flares and tracking lights in the dark skies. They're his fellow survivors, being picked up and taken home by rescue pods. Unless they're getting picked off, harvested and assimilated by the Borg, of course.

And behind the Borg, it's rumoured, the Shing, once again. But it's better not to think about that.

But then, the pilots being picked up weren't damn fools enough to linger with the locals on Winter a few hours, and get their trackers disabled, so bully for them. Laurie is chewing at a fairly disgusting dehydrated rations bar, and brooding about how much water he's got left. And how much it matters that your life-tracker's on the blink, when you might not have enough life left for it to really matter at all... So that he maybe misses the shake and grinding clip of another pod-vessel, locking on to the mating connector of his bubble. It's followed by the rather timid buzz of a request for admission, on the internal cubicle-door to the air-lock.

Saved! He's saved! Or doomed, of course. But as he squints at the vis-screen, taking a ganders at his new guest, Laurie feels pretty sure that this isn't a Borg-faced masked marauder set upon blasting him into oblivion or hauling him off to be broken down for scrap, and co-opted for the greater good of the hive. For one thing, he can see the chap, and those wide, ingenuous blue eyes are honest and fairly intelligent, and more than a bit apologetic. And for another, he's wearing the slightly nerdy scrub-suit of the Starfleet medical star-corp.

Anyway. Death by using the last of his dried-out nutri-bars and recycled-water, or by being too trusting of a mined-out ex-human posing as a Starfleet medic? Laurie shrugs, and beeps open the air-lock. 

And the beaming face revealed, as his guest pulls off his helmet and takes a free unfettered breath of the recycled warm stale air of the capsule, reassures him considerably. That isn't the face of any Borg or co-traveller. It isn't the face of anyone with the wit and low cunning to be a deceptive double-agent, for a start. And he doesn't think a Borg drone, even a cunningly disguised one, would have quite such a shy and uncertain smile. “Hello there! I say. Nice place you've got here,” the fellow offers, clunkily earnest enough that Laurie isn't certain it's a joke. “But I expect you're quite keen to get out and get back to your unit, am I right? I take it from your uniform,” and here his eyes skim over Laurie's ripped and torn Star fleet junior combat pilot jumpsuit, his battered leg that the kit-meds are only doing so much to ameliorate – and over his thighs and arse, for that matter, sly and then suddenly innocent – “that you're attached to the Starfleet astro-service? How about I get to work on the injuries you've sustained?” The informality's restful, if unorthodox. He probably doesn't find that injured pilots care that much about name, rank and serial number, no doubt. And he wiggles aloft his medi-kit, packed with nanites and morphia. It's a promise of proper pain relief, and an instant healing of the trauma to muscle and bone that will leave Laurie lame if not for Starfleet medical tech. And it makes something locked tight like a vice in Laurie's chest, unspool. He feels as if he might actually cry. He's had a really poor-quality couple of days, lost in a space war.

“Lieutenant Reid, Medical Corps, by the way,” his rescuer says awkwardly, holding out a hand that isn't busy with the second-skin wrapping, mini-morphia (addiction-safe!) and nano-remould glitter-tube. “Lieutenant Junior Grade, that is. U.S.S. Asclepius. But call me Sandy.” Laurie shakes, and mentally gives thanks for the twenty-sixth century. His leg'd be food for worms, or turned by the Borg, in less than forty-eight hours without it. Even if it means he'll be back on the front line and flying as a lowly grunt – strictly reconnaissance, barely brushing the edges of any real trouble – in the war against the Borg, after a week's grace. 

“Odell,” he offers. “L.P., Recon., Crewman First Class. Laurie, if you like.” 

And by God, the pain-relief of the m-morph is wonderful, by a factor of billions over and above the eked-out grudgingness of his emergency kit. The sudden warmth and physical relaxation, the absence of any need for gritted teeth and tensing himself against gritty burning shudders of pain, is almost enough to divert all of his attention from the med officer, this Reid person. It isn't as if Reid suddenly stops in his practised, routine ministrations for serious, limb-threatening, quick-fix injury. But one little tendril of Laurie's mind comments, idly, that the fellow's eyes are glazed, fixed on a corner of the bubble they temporarily inhabit that has nothing of interest to recommend it. Still, his hands run through automatic procedures, ingrained enough with technique that they barely require oversight. 

“Laurie,” he murmurs, nodding to himself as he yanks another length of second-skin out of the med-kit. “An apostrophe in the O'Dell?”

And Laurie laughs, a little. He can, now: the pain was too much, before. “We're originally Odonian: not Old-Terra Irish.”

“Ah,” Reid agrees, finishing off the knot and the binding with a final slick of salve. It makes Laurie's skin ping with the up-tick to his immune system. “Well, aren't we all good little Hainish warriors of peace, love and understanding now? According to how the treaties and Federation sign-ups are going, this week, anyway.” He clearly has no more interest in politics or diplomatic negotiation between the galaxy's superpowers than Laurie, though. And he smiles as he rests a hand on Laurie's exposed knee. It's rather familiar, but then a medic is allowed certain privileges of patronage. “I ask because the name seems familiar. I think I saw it on the weekly list of the fatalities and assimilations from the battle against the covert Borg invasion in this quadrant. Perhaps one of your clan: sorry if it comes as a shock. D'you have any brothers or cousins in the Service?”

And Laurie knows what that's about, and shrugs easily. “No, only child here. But I've a fair idea how it came about. Our track-chips?” He holds up his wrist, with the suckered-in little indentation. It's where the chip identifies the blood-line and burrows in at about the same time as the cord's cut, after birth. Very much like a Borg nanoprobe injection, superficially, yet benign and differing profoundly. “The ones that even the heat-death of the universe can't obstruct or deactivate?”

Reid grimaces. “Bloody nuisances. My nan can remember when you could go and get plastered and spend a night in a Companion-temple, without your Mum tracking it and greeting you with the rolling pin when you rolled home two days later. Or alternatively, I suppose, the good old days when you could meet your end in battle and have your loved ones weeping and wailing and grieving in uncertainty for months, instead of your name going up on the boards of the dead pretty much instantly. I take it you found an out?”

And Laurie grins. “Well, I don't know what did it for sure. All I can say is, if you're ever seeking shelter after a minor skirmish and get invited into a Winter kemmer ceremony house by the neutral Gethenians... maybe give it a miss. I don't know what did it exactly, but there was certainly something odd about the chanting. I was pretty much hypnotised, feeling no pain even with this to take account of.” And he nods down to his leg. “Wonder if my vital signs slowed enough that the chip marked me down as lost to the cause? Odder things have happened on Winter. Every day. Neither food nor sex mean quite the same thing there as anywhere else. Why not life and death, too?” That wasn't the only strange effect the ceremony had had, but no need to discuss that now. Certainly not with Reid. Laurie looks at his wrist again, and flicks at the little artificial dimple, silent where it's ticked away peaceably since before he could toddle or talk, counting down the minutes and the steps of his life. It's silent, now, and the silence is odder than he has speech to express. But still, he's alive, with or without that constant companion.

“The hangover, though,” he adds. “That really did last longer than infinity.”

“I'll bear it in mind,” Reid says, and smiles at him, companionable, good-humoured. “You know, I suppose I could just let 'em beam you up on your own ship, now you're all fixed up. But on the other hand, a free week...” He looks like he has a better idea, and Laurie waits. 

“There's a bit of a do going on, on my home ship, this evening.” He looks at his digit-counter, and purses his lips. “Welcoming home sailors from the sea of space and the battle of the Peace Quadrant. Not to mention enforced celibacy and odd run-ins with off-limits Winter natives. Actually, if we set off now, we'll not miss much of the start. Plenty of free bunks, you'd be more than welcome. What do you say?”

Really there's only one thing to say, and Laurie says it. And Sandy's vessel fortunately has ansible functionality and the comms are sparking on all cylinders, which is more than his poor pod any more, after the trials and travails of war and inept sailing. As they zip through warpspace and watch the busy activities between the stars, Laurie sends a message to his mother. The shock of him being alive, after all, might temporarily trump the joy of it for her. And he doubts that dear old Straike will be overjoyed in any case. But the thought of her grief has made everything so much worse – and the thought of poor Gyp, never quite understanding what had happened to him. Pity you can't insta-message a _dog_ across galaxies and warps in time. Gyp would have suffered a sight more than Straike.

And the transfer takes about as long as it always does – a little less than you ever expect – and Sandy is a... garrulous, pleasant companion. Mostly pleasant, though. As they lock on to the docking bay, and Sandy sets electronic procedures scanning them for viruses, Borg tech, guest status and approval and general permission to board, Sandy puts a hand to the small of Laurie's back, and ushers him aboard. He seems taut, elevated, a little on edge. Laurie only hopes that he hasn't let himself in for more that he assumed, when he agreed to come along and hang out for a few free days. Sandy doesn't think he's a romantic prospect, does he? Because however hilarious first Hugh and then Charles always used to find it, it doesn't mean that Laurie's prissy, or picky, or whatever they want to call it. It just means he's _romantic_ , that's all, and if it's a crime then sue him okay? It's not as if he's Vulcan, for the sake of every Odonian secular substitute for a deity. Not even halfway there.

Not like Lanyon. That thought gets folded up and put away quick, though. Sharp creases, hospital corners. Especially as Sandy is currently saying – as they sweep down clinically-white corridors, a pleasant update from the Starfleet's old garish style – “My boyfriend just got home from active duty last night, and I've been so busy picking up the flotsam and jetsam that I haven't managed to get a glimpse of him barring on the vid-screen. My Alec! He's a medic, like me – well, no-one's a medic quite like Alec. Did I say he won the Intra-Federation prize for Field Medicine? We've been together for nearly four months now, but I haven't seen him for the last two weeks. Can't wait!”

Which is a bloody relief, because Sandy is distinctly not his type – even if Laurie hasn't quite worked out, despite not being exactly a blooming adolescent any longer, exactly what that type is. Well, beyond ice-pale hair, and eyes that can chill at a pace and a half away, not that he often got that close, and pointy-tipped ears that lure the eye even as a nicely-brought-up Hainishman struggles not to stare... Which is ludicrous. Lanyon hasn't even crossed his mind for... ooh, three months, maybe. He's not Penelope undoing her weaving nightly, perish it. Why now, why here and tonight, he wonders. Perhaps it's just the shock of the battle, followed by the isolation and grimness of imperfectly treated injury and possible imminent death by starvation/dehydration, the strangeness of the loss of electronic connection to the rest of his people... (Not that it makes them Borg-like. But sometimes, one can almost understand the temptation and the comfort, the sense of community, from the distant, respectful Hain/Starfleet union version.)

But Lanyon, these past forty-eight hours, keeps popping up in his mind like he hasn't since the whole mess went down, during Laurie's scant six months as an exchange student at the Vulcan Starfleet training college twinned with his own Hainish _alma mater_. As vivid as if it was yesterday, the starry admired personality of the senior-year cadets, suddenly brought low by... Well, it does no good to go over it all again. Laurie's alive and in one piece, and no doubt his mother is toasting him with a sickly sweet sherry somewhere across the universe, in celebration. He should be happy, not seething with maudlin brooding and nostalgia. 

And it helps as Sandy drags him into the communal meeting room where festivities are clearly underway, and a buzz of chatter and a fug of alcohol clears his mind with white-noise command. Christ, the place is packed. It's like half the Fleet is rammed into a small fishing vessel, celebrating and commiserating and trying to forget that nano-meds that keep you whole – again and again – whatever your injuries sustained – also keep you plunging back into the gore and the horror, polished up all shiny and new to fight another day. War is hell, and now that no soldier retains amputee status, and few wounds are fatal, it's also perpetual.

“Hello sailor, put a smile on your face, we won, didn't you hear?” That's his maudlin musings interrupted, thank God, as a reveller shoves a drink into his hand, then into Sandy's. Small, pretty and long-lashed, and wearing the rare and coveted red jersey that marks him out as one of the Fleet's high-flyers, destined for better things and more dangerous missions. He puts a finger to his chin and considers Laurie, lips pursed, twitching with interest. But it's Sandy he addresses his thoughts to. “Fresh meat, darling? Goram, don't keep it to yourself, it's not pally.” But Sandy looks between them and seems to hesitate, mouth open but choking on the introduction.

“Oh well, I'll bite,” Laurie's new friend announces smoothly, sticking a hand out. “Bim Taylor, darling: fighter pilot of the Haino-Sinhalese Alliance. As long as it lasts, at least. And you are...?”

The chap reminds Laurie of Charles, a bit. Which he wouldn't absolutely categorize as a _bad_ thing: just that... “Laurie. Odell,” he says, a bit reluctant. The shake is overly firm, and he's deliberately passive and limp in response.

But that's no reason for a charged and pregnant silence to follow, is it? Nor for this Bim chap to stare, first at him, then at Sandy, and then back again. “Really,” he says flatly. Then seems to recover from a blow struck, and repeats himself. “Really?... What a delightful name. Uncommon, if you'll excuse the observation. Would there be an apostrophe involved anywhere along the line? Or are you one of the rebel-Hainish Odonians, you old rogues, thorns in the Hain side and black sheep in general? Tell me, do anarchists ever submit or tell each other what to do in bed, or do you all just do your own thing? And if so, how do you keep track of what's going where?” All the pop-eyed banter is forced, Laurie can feel it. It's no more than an auto-pilot surface raillery. His eyes are saying more meaningful things, but in a code Laurie hasn't the Enigma machine to decipher. And they're saying them to Sandy, who looks uncomfortable, and shifts slightly in the mediscrubs that he hasn't had a moment to change out of. 

The pause is definitely awkward, even if Laurie doesn't understand why. But it isn't as if he isn't used to being enough of a square wheel and hexagonal peg to throw a spanner into about fifty percent of conversations, in any case. Bim has his head cocked, is giving Laurie a proper birdy scrutiny. Then nods to himself, as if he's sorted something out in his head. “Well, boys. I simply must go and do the rounds. If the grapevine isn't up on the latest then everyone will be on at me for failing in my duty, isn't that right, Sandy?” And with a dramatic toss of rather long hair, and in a flash of red that rather becomes his pale skin, he's off and zig-zagging through the assembled throng.

Which is packed out, for Odo's sake. And it isn't as if Laurie isn't used to informal lower-ranks Starfleet parties – pack 'em in, pour cheap ale down 'em and be merry, for tomorrow we die. If we're lucky, maybe. Because if we're just injured or mutilated, then the nanobots will sort that right out, and it's back unto the chaotic, violent and terrifying fray. With the Borg luring us like childcatchers, seductive and promising.

The third option being assimilation, and anything's better than that.

It isn't as if Laurie has been actively looking forward to shuffling off this mortal coil. But there had been something restful about the prospect, just the same. This is his umpteenth brush with death: it gets a bit stale, in the end. And, insult to injury, it's not only Bim making his excuses, but now his _ad hoc_ host for the evening. Without even introducing him to anyone else or getting him another drink. Not that he's lost the use of his legs, but still... “Will you be all right here if I just, er, dump you for a minute?” Sandy is asking anxiously. “I've simply got to get out of this suit or I'll expire or rot. If I come back and find you in five, all right?” 

And he barely troubles to get an assent, before he's off. Laurie sighs – slightly insulted at the imputation that he's a kiddie who can't take care of himself at a proper grown-up social do. Well, where's a barely-acquainted knight in a rocket-powered charger's place, if not in the wrong? And he turns away, towards what looks like the drinks table. But not before he notices that Sandy's rush to reassemble his ensemble for the evening, seems to involve an awfully big detour that chases, quite faithfully, a trailing path after Bim's own zig-zag madcap hurtling through the big, cavernous shipboard meeting room. Laurie watches the process a moment: first Bim hits a knot of people, exchanges a few niceties and some raucous laughter, and then chooses one person to get more friendly and familiar with, a lot of heads-together nattering and pop-eyes involved. Then as he moves on to the next patch of unspoiled social territory, Sandy follows after. It looks like a mopping-up job, triage on the worst of the gossipy havoc Bim is no doubt wreaking.

Laurie thinks he knows the type. He does have a few fond memories of Charles. But what does he care, and he turns to grab a glass and fuel up for a few social exchanges. An hour ago he was badly wounded and facing death by voluntary exit or starvation or blood loss. Getting well-oiled with a roomful of service strangers seems like the better end of the exchange. Even though his leg is actually not fully on the mend quite yet, and twinges rather unpleasantly as he swivels and moves around the bottle-arsenal. He might have to ask Sandy for another nano-dose, he's thinking, be careful that it takes and doesn't leave him with a gammy peg. 

It doesn't help when he receives a tap to the shoulder. He's pouring himself a tot of rum and sloshing something fizzy and neon-bright in there, and turns around a little too quickly. There's a pain like someone's swapped a hot poker in for his thigh bone, for a second. It blurs perception of his new companion, and blots out sound. But when he's gasped for one moment, the pain ebbs and he opens his squeezed-shut eyes and smiles, shaky.

Modern medicine isn't quite perfect, yet. The dark-haired thin-faced young man at his side looks concerned. “Oh hell, are you all right? It is Laurie, isn't it?-- Sandy sent me to find you, or to look for the nearest person I'd never seen before. 'Someone in fatigues and a pain relief plaster stuck over the shin with his trouser leg slashed open.' Bloody irresponsible of him to bring you here at all, you should be lying in the sickbay and drinking clear broth, not–” He sniffs at Laurie's drink, surreptitiously. “Oh Christ, don't drink that. It's absolute rotgut that Bunny brings in from somewhere, I think it's Rebel moonshine. Here, try this.” And he swaps out Laurie's glass for a new one, and pours him a tot of some clear spirit and a dash of some obscure pseudo-fruit juice, best not to enquire. Times are troubled and the trade routes are unreliable in war. Sometimes little rebel traders from odd corners and pockets of the galaxy are the only sources of good product. Laurie knows a fellow called Mal, from a pocket of worlds cordoned-off... Quarantined, you might say.

Laurie smiles, still embarrassingly tremulous, and takes a sip. “Thanks. Yes, I'm Laurie. Very kind of Sandy to send you after me. And to bring me in the first place. And, I suppose, to rescue me from the bleakest coldest asteroid even rotating somewhere as cold as Winter.”

The fellow sticks out a free hand. His smile is impulsively sweet, and gives the impression of being little used, fresh out of the box and carefully stored for appropriate occasions, without a professional function. “Alec Deacon. I'm a medic, like Sandy: and my professional opinion is that you need to get the weight off that leg right now. Come and sit down with me.”

Laurie's mother has schooled him well, in Odonian emotional transaction processes, and in positively prehistoric courtesies, honorifics dating from the first go-round with technology and civilisation of the universe. An introduction isn't complete, not without a complete name. Shaking this pleasant fellow's hand, he says, “Oh, the boyfriend! Sandy made you sound much more intimidating. Laurie Odell, by the way. The Odonian, not the Terran punctutation style,” he adds, since it seems to be a bit of an issue this evening. 

It would be inaccurate to say that the smile is wiped right off Deacon's face. It's still hanging in there. It's just a little fixed and glassy. “Odell,” he repeats, and straightens up a little bit. “The name's familiar...”

(Honestly, people seem fixated on this issue, this evening. Although, he supposes that if he's gone up on the boards as dead, then names are going to stick in people's minds. When the revised lists of the dead – and the assimilated – go up in all communal areas, in every Starfleet ship, all eyes are on them. Like meerkats people still for a moment, staring up at the yellow flickering digits on the black screens. The audio-translate might as well squeak out that the Borg are immortal, but if you're Hain Starfleet then eventually your number's up. It's like being on a railway platform, seeing if anyone you know has boarded the train to a destination where you can't join them. You scan through, you keep an eye out for your friends, your sibs, your family, even bare acquaintances and detested colleagues... Nano-meds can do a lot, amazing things. They haven't managed to cure death, yet, though. And there's rarely a route back from assimilation, rarely enough to call it never.) 

“I suppose it might be,” Laurie agrees briskly, and he holds out his wrist. The silent, motionless wrist dint is a little unnerving. He'll be glad to get it reactivated: to be without the pulse that should twin it would be almost less disturbing. “It seems that the urban myths about being careful where you wander in backwater worlds, people getting their trackers deactivated by funny card-scanners or hedgewitches in Earthsea are... Well, they're probably still bunk, mostly. But as you see...”

And Deacon leans forward – then a little closer – to examine the point next to the pulsing bloodvessel on Laurie's offered, upturned wrist. It should be emitting the steady, self-satisfied, golluping little tick that echoes and steadies the torrent of his arteries. From the first moments of his life – anyone's life – it pulses, until the last sighing failure of the ventricular gates. At least, if you're Hainish, and the enfranchising vaccination program against the march of the Borg has reached your little corner of the galaxy yet. The other side are possessed and eaten up in ways still more intimate. “You're dead,” he says, rather flat. 

It's one way of putting it, and Laurie laughs with slight discomfiture. “Reportedly, anyway. 'Reports of my death were greatly exaggerated', don't they say?”

“But widely disseminated,” Deacon adds, straightening up and looking him in the eye. “I didn't see your name come up on the boards myself. Probably wouldn't have taken any notice if I had. We weren't acquainted, and the name's not similar to anyone I know. But a friend of mine – a mutual acquaintance – was the officer responsible for the totals and update forty-eight hours ago, aboard the mothership. Ralph Lanyon: senior officer for novel territory mapping and post-conflict reconnaissance, U.S.S. Charioteer. Ring any bells?”

Now it's Laurie's turn to slow up, caught up in coagulated time and space as if light itself has decided to slow down and take it easy. The name's not a stranger to his thoughts: but it's a long time since anyone's actually said it to him. He can't just stand and gawk like a loon, though. 

He opens his mouth, with good intentions. And that's all he does. Then he shuts it again. They look at each other, stumped both apiece. 

Deacon recovers first. Maybe it's the professional training. “I can't hang about here, anyway,” he says abruptly. “Sorry to leave you to sink or swim, but actually Ralph should be turning up shortly. I want to get a hold of him first. I do feel he ought to have some warning.” And he turns away from Laurie, to head away into the singing shouting merry throng. 

It's too late, though. Too late, because something's twanging at Laurie's instincts, it's setting all his senses alight as if a madeleine just got shoved under his nose. He could be back in his study at the Starfleet training school, back in his bunk for his six-month study exchange at its Vulcan equivalent, with Hugh Treviss and half a dozen other star students from the Hainish cadet schools. Like the immediate moments after the damage to tendon and flesh, for a moment he's not sure where he's been hit, or what's the damage done. There's a transitory pain in his leg and another, much less transitory, recurring all these years, somewhere else. It seems to be located nowhere in particular, and everywhere.

A voice, that's it. Someone speaking loud and sharp and clear enough to stand out from the milling chatter, and someone who sounds pretty annoyed too. “...bloody rubbish are you talking about, Sandy? If you want to play the man of mystery and secret occult knowledge then why the hell don't you? And while you're at it, go and be important and enigmatic somewhere I'm not forced to pretend an interest I couldn't possibly feel?”

And Deacon hears it in the same moment that Laurie does. It's clear, the way he freezes, just like Laurie's affixed to the spot like somebody glued him but good. It's Lanyon. It shouldn't really be such a shock: he's had what should be accounted fair warning. If he got plugged in battle with that amount of prior notice, then started weeping and wailing about not having the training or notification to be expected to deal with it, his commanding officer would probably turf him off to the nutty ward, sicked out as not fit for service, not without justification.

He's had a damn sight more warning than Lanyon, at any rate. And that despite the combined efforts of Sandy Reid and that Bim fellow, presumably. And Deacon's unfulfilled good intentions. Laurie feels bad about that, about holding him back when he could have been saying something to prevent Lanyon getting a bit of a shock, about an old fellow alumni presumed dead. Or something a bit stronger than presumption, really, since trackers are supposed to be damn-near infallible.

Laurie feels worse than bad, though, as Lanyon emerges out of the crowd. He's unutterably strange to look upon, precisely due to being instantly, utterly familiar. Laurie is standing and waiting just a little behind Deacon, rigidly alert, and not only for reasons of the fire in his leg. For Lanyon, it's sprung upon him. One moment he's looking back over his shoulder and snapping at poor Reid, following on behind helpless and cowed-looking. The next he turns to look before him, and it's like he's taken a shot across the bows.

His face goes from dismissively irritable and contemptuous, an officer giving a piece of his mind to an unkempt underling, to undefended as a private house marauded in the night, in a moment. He looks like a child awaiting a promised gift from a cruel older brother, one who can't be trusted to grant a wish that doesn't involve a kick in the nuts as a punchline. Then visibly – the quickness is admirable – he pulls himself together. He's over to Laurie in a couple of brisk strides, and that's up a lot too close for comfort. Even at a little distance it's fiercely discomfiting: but at least there was the possibility of running away, a moment since, and a moment lost, now. Now, if he turned tail and high-tailed it out, Lanyon could just grab him by the scruff of the neck and give him a shake, ask him what the hell he thinks he's playing at. To man up, face up to his iniquities and accept a few brusque and startling consequences. Not that much different from his conduct with the odd new recruit back at the Vulcan brother Starfleet school, but that's a profitless avenue for ruminations. And Laurie doesn't want to think about how that ended.

Now, it's terrifyingly strange that his memory's lost so little in its recollection of Lanyon. His face is a little more severe, but there was never much youthful about it to begin with. For all that none of them are past thirty, Lanyon looks to be scraping up closer than the rest. His hair is cropped closer, his eyes slit a little narrower under naturally stylized Vulcan brows, and the ears... Laurie can feel the most idiotic blush begin to betray him. It almost seems due time for a re-run of an internal lecture he used to give himself on a fairly regular basis in days gone past. That Terra is ancient history, a dead world, and the Puritans have only a couple of enclaves amongst the outlying worlds. And that eroticizing the outer shell of the ear is a piece of ridiculousness that surpasses even the most _outré_ kinkplay you might find in an outlaw Companion's bordello. 

It didn't do any good back then, and it probably won't do any more good now. Fortunately Lanyon's probably too tensely focused to notice. Too angry? Will he lower himself to anger, or rationalise it away? Laurie opens his mouth to speak, and the, “Hello, Lanyon,” that he manages is a little phlegmy and gurgled, but still better than no attempt to head trouble off at the pass whatsoever. But Lanyon takes sod all notice, as might have been predicted from his manner and expression.

No, he reaches out instead, and takes Laurie's chin between finger and thumb. Pretty hard, actually: you could call it a pinch. Not the kind of pinch that'd knock Laurie out, though, or not yet. And he swiftly jerks Laurie's head side to side, much as one in search of something and about to light a fire if he finds it. Laurie thinks Lanyon's free hand might have gone to his phaser. He also thinks that his head might come off at the next twist, as he squeaks, and Deacon steps closer, pats a hand to Lanyon's shoulder-blade and coughs. 

“Really, Ralph?” But it's Reid who appears on the scene, and de-escalates the situation. He's flushed, uneasy of eye, embarrassed and annoyed. But highly rational and instantly onto the matter at hand, Laurie has to give him that. “Are you seriously hypothesizing that an android doppelganger or a humanoid modified Borg sympathiser could get past the gate-scanners on the ship? Seriously? Where are your manners? Yes, it actually _is_ Odell, by the way: if you need it spelling out. I thought the pair of you were old confederates, isn't that so? Alec said you were quite upset – well, for you, anyway – the other evening when the report ran and his name came up, in fact he–”

But when Ralph turns his full attention on him – without saying a word, just leaning in a little close and glaring – then Reid demonstrates his good sense by buttoning his lip. And Deacon demonstrates that his own good sense surpasses even that, applying a hand to the back of Sandy's neck and steering him away. He gives Lanyon a look as he goes that Laurie hasn't the code to read. And he pats Laurie's shoulder, too, and merely mutters, “Good luck.”

If would be more comforting if Laurie didn't suddenly feel that he might require it. That leaves, barring a few discreetly interested parties observing from a greater distance, himself practically alone with Lanyon. Or as alone as it's possible to get in their current environment and circumstances, with the clink of glasses, the whirr of the ship engines and the not-disinterested buzz of conversation all around. Laurie doesn't try to evade Lanyon's eyes, because he knows better from experience.

And it starts with the obvious, because that's the thing about Vulcans or half-Vulcans: they do like to state their premises, before they apply logic. “You're dead,” Lanyon says, and if Laurie manages to stifle most of a laugh then he thinks he's done pretty well. The second same accusation of the night, after all. Not that Lanyon is finding anything about this remotely funny, it's absolutely crystal.

It's a temptation to respond as if they're still back in cadet school, as if he's still directly junior and respectfully deferential, not just appropriately civil to a slightly senior officer. But they're not, and the delicate curlicues of personal history have skewed their relative positions a little. Laurie isn't exactly a practised flirt, even now: but he can feel there's something playful about the smile he allows himself, as he holds out his wrist. “My tracker agrees with you. But it's not the only evidence to take into account.”

Lanyon seizes upon it – literally, and it's a bit embarrassing to be gripped by the forearm as Lanyon meticulously examines his hand, his wrist, and the little dead spot by the ulna that should normally be twitching in a quiet digital echo of a biological rhythm section. But more than embarrassment, it also provides fresh data for him, too. Lanyon's wearing a glove: just the one, on the hand that's holding him still, as the other pokes and prods carefully. And there's something that feels off and lop-sided about his grip. 

He's not the only one who notices: and now he sees, too, where Deacon has got to, just the other side of the bottle table and looming over Bim, the officious and inquisitive fellow from ten minutes ago. But now he's all about Lanyon, for the moment. And he leans over the table, his voice loud enough to silence the hum of conversations all around them. “For Odo's sake, Ralph, your hand! Seriously, you still haven't had it nano-sprayed? Do I need to tell you again that medics aren't actually miracle workers, and neither are nanite particles? You leave that stump one week longer and it'll be too late, and that'll be you out of an officer commission when even starfish stem-cells can't regrow the digits. Ralph? Don't walk away from me, damn it – come here. How d'you imagine you're going to do the Vulcan salute with two fingers left, hey?”

The grip on Laurie's arm is accelerating via directional change, though, and walking away is exactly what he's doing. So is Laurie: he isn't given much option in the matter. Lanyon does look back over his shoulder to speak, though. “There's another salute I could still give you, Alec, if you really want.” But he doesn't stop until he's steered Laurie into a dark corner and levered him down onto a plush settee. It's too over-stuffed for comfort. 

Deacon doesn't pursue them: presumably he knows his breath would be wasted, or intends to follow up his diatribe later, at a more propitious moment. For now, Laurie feels himself decanted into a little glass bubble of silence. And mostly to stave off further accusations about not being a corpse, he seizes on the most immediate thing, and looks down at the glove on Lanyon's hand. “He seems quite concerned,” he observes. “Are you late getting treatment for something?”

Lanyon looks too, and abruptly pulls the glove off. Which proves to be half stuffed for appearances' sake, and in its absence reveals two and a half missing fingers, and stumps red and raw enough to be recent. Laurie sucks in a breath, and winces. Even with the biotechnology available to grow back most limbs and digits with astonishing speed and ease, it's not a sight that most people get used to. Not even in wartime. 

Not everyone can be as _blasé_ as Lanyon about it, at any rate. But then, Vulcans, after all. He lifts it up to the light and flexes it, what he can, what's left, with a face preternaturally calm and unmoved. “Alec's an old worryguts,” he says, unconcerned. “You heard him: as he says himself, I've a week yet before there's any reason to worry. I was a bit busy at the battle-site after that Peace Quadrant business where you decided to disappear off the radar. Too busy ferrying casualties and refugees to get it looked at and regrown. And since then, it's just been one damn thing after another. But I'll be getting on to it, shortly. Whatever Alec thinks, I'm not self-destructive enough to let it go. I'm half-Vulcan, remember. Self-destruction isn't amenable to logical process.”

He puts the glove back on, and rests the hand on his knee, turns his attention back to Laurie. It feels oddly intimate, the two of them practically alone and hived off by the forcefield buzz of the crowd, not drawn in by it. The settee barely seats two and they're bodged in together, turned towards each other with knees almost touching. Where Lanyon's hand rests on his own knee it almost touches Laurie's, and Laurie can't remember now, with the glove back on, if that finger nearly brushing him is real or kapok stuffing. 

“One of the things taking up my attention until just now, was thinking that you were dead,” Lanyon says, and it's loud and abrupt. 

Oh, well. “Sorry about that,” Laurie offers, with what he can feel is a tentative smile. He tries his drink, which appears to consist of more fingers of spirit than mixer. 

“Not your fault. Bloody tech, that's all, we all rely on it until we forget that you can't, always,” Lanyon says. “Seeing your name on the lists, it took me right back a few years, that's all.”

Laurie supposes that it would. As if that could be any kind of a good thing. He shouldn't have come.

xxx

Oh-six-hundred hours, a few years or centuries prior, and Laurie was flat-out exhausted as he traipsed into his shared dorm-cube at the training school. Yomping through the night on a survival run on a biologically semi-hostile planet will do that to you. It would have helped if his room-mate was Vulcan, as you might reasonably expect, and it would have been normal procedure. But for some reason he had been lumped in with another Hainish human for his exchange-student semester at the Vulcan Starfleet brother-school, so he was stuck. Creeping in and disturbing a Vulcan's early-hours rest might at worst result in a disquisition on the illogicality of assuming that what he thought of as stealthy noiselessness would be so perceived by anyone attempting to sleep, followed by a reasoned reckoning up of appropriate recompense. 

Hugh, on the other hand, was a good fellow with a lousy temper if his sleep was disturbed, and if Laurie squeaked one sole of his boot then he was liable to get his head bitten off and his candy ration mysteriously disappearing for a week, in a petulant spirit of lesson-teaching. So he crept in with attenuated breathing, holding his backpack motionless to prevent the contents noisily shifting, trying even not to move his head and disturb an unruly hair on it. 

It was to no purpose, it turned out, since Hugh was awake. Awake and not alone, either. His company was T'Halek, a Vulcan senior-year cadet he'd got moderately pally with since they shared a hide on an orienteering exercise on the course four months back. (As pally as you could get with a full-blood Vulcan: the fellow would probably term it a 'productive and courteous professional relationship', at most.) There was that vibe of a sudden blanket of silence descending on the room as Laurie stepped into it. And T'Halek gave Hugh a significant look, turned and nodded his head to Laurie.

“My compliments, gentlemen,” was the full substance of what he had to say. And he exited with precise and economical grace, as if this was merely where he'd meant to be for a little while, and now he meant to be elsewhere.

“Is it something I said?” Laurie called after him, with the crude tin-ear to social niceties he liked to affect when it would cause most discomfort. You couldn't discomfit a Vulcan, that was the trouble. “Did I hear my name mentioned?” He didn't really care, though. Right now sleep would be the dearest, sweetest thing in the world: he was only afraid, from the look in Hugh's eye, that he was in for a good twenty minutes of hysterical gossip and whispered confidences, instead. The trouble with single-sex training schools was that a single gender were such bitches, all cooped up together: and males would never just cheerfully admit it, as women were allowed, but must always find other names and descriptions, sociologists for whom nude dancing and orgies have to be relabelled interpretive terpsichorean explorations and experiments in genital reconfiguration. Interesting to know that Vulcans indulged in gossip like anyone else, though. God knew what they called it.

Thus he was careful not to meet Hugh's eye as he turned to his own bed and tipped his backpack over the side, figuring if he just lay down very quietly and evinced no interest in proceedings whatsoever, just lay down quietly and started snoring practically immediately– 

“Do you know what that was about?” Well, it wasn't as if Laurie had seriously expected that tactic to do a blind bit of good. He rolled back over, sighing elaborately.

“You haven't heard?” Hugh said dramatically. He was in the middle of the floor, now, and gesturing in a non-specific way. Laurie looked him in the eye, because he felt practically inert, and calculated that no more encouragement was necessary.

“Well, it's a damn shame!” Hugh burst out, just as if Laurie was arguing about something or other. “It's ridiculous! It's not as if it would even be an issue back home!”

Laurie sighed, and swung his legs back over the edge of the bed, sat up once more. He patted the blanket to his side. “Tell Auntie all about it,” he suggested.

Four minutes later, and he was really wishing he hadn't. Not only because Hugh's literal mind took him literally, with a lot of unnecessary extraneous detail. Also because his brain rejected the facts of the matter. “They _can't_ dishonourably discharge him, for a bit of a fiddle in a dark corner with a junior. It's not as if either of them are officers yet, there's no issue of abuse of seniority involved. Christ, even if there was, you were here for the tail-end of Eustace T'lam's _pon farr_ at the beginning of term, same as me – are you ever going to be able to eradicate some of the images out of your brain? Because I'm telling you, I'll need PTSD counselling for about the next twenty years for some of the sights I saw, that I wouldn't wish on old Spock even.”

“Oh, _pon farr_ ,” Hugh said contemptuously. But seeming a lot easier in his mind and manner, now that he'd offloaded some of his stress and disbelief onto Laurie, who was feeling the full weight of it. “It's not mating we're talking about. They wouldn't even acknowledge that as an issue. Not even a pervy little hole-and-corner tup with a bit of an age disparity – that'd be under the carpet with the dust-mites. He wrote _billets-doux_ , for Christ's sake, Odell. There was even hinting around about being an official item, stuff on voice-mail. What I mostly can't believe is that he didn't have the sense to be discreet about it. Or at least make sure it was deniable. At least then when Hazell got pulled up for boasting about a senior-year Vulcan boyfriend, he could have looked severe and disapproving and suggested the little bugger was overstating a quick shag and a bit of BDSM play.”

Laurie's head was in his hands, but they didn't feel strong enough to bear the weight of this. “I can't understand why it's such an issue. Back home, no-one would care...”

“Back home, nobody's Vulcan, my dear,” Hugh agreed breezily, settling back on the bed with his hands behind his head. “It is a pity. If he'd gone to our place, he could have been all the gallant knight he wanted, plucked a lute beneath his lady's window, gone all-out on Valentine's day. Here, it's worse than déclassé: it's practically perverted. And it only reminds the top-brass that he's half-human to start with: it's a wonder that he ever got into the academy in the first place. Not that _Vulcan emotions_ is an oxymoron: but you don't go about the place flaunting 'em. It's not decent, or that's how they look at it. Not unless you're one of the proscribed reactionary groups, and certainly not if you've got any ambition at all. Now he's provided them with concrete evidence of soft human emotion and romantic leanings? He's out: and he's not coming back.”

“But he could transfer...” Laurie suggested, clinging on stubbornly to reasonable interpretations and half-hopes.

Hugh seemed to consider it a moment, seriously. “To our place? I suppose he could. But do you think he will? The Vulcans fight side by side with us, it's true: that doesn't mean they don't look down on our weaknesses. They're still senior partner, you know. They don't forget, even if we do. One of my grandmother's grandmothers was Terran, and Jewish. She married an Episcopalian and tried to get her first-born into Groton. When they laughed her out of the reception evening, do you think she gave up and sent him to a nice Jewish day-school? Like hell. She fought it out until she got him into at least a second-tier East coast prep school, just on principle. Internalised bias and exclusion from elite groups: it's a powerful psychological motivator, Laurie-boy.”

And Laurie looked at him uncomprehending: since Hugh had had the self-importance and the fun of his disclosure and trawling over all the sad sorry mess. And now Laurie was left with the welter and the squeezing distress of actual feeling, of fury and powerlessness. 

Hugh took pity on his clear incomprehension and slight irritation, too. “Imagine if Odo was your gran, and they wouldn't let you into Hainish kindergarten because they said anarchists can't co-operate and share their toys,” he suggested helpfully. Then rolled his eyes as Laurie screwed up his face angrily. “Anyway. Going to a human academy would be a real step-down for a Vulcan, seriously. And no Vulcan cadet school's going to accept Lanyon now. He's shamed his family. Never mind his mother, I hear his Dad's more Vulcan than the Vulcans, completely assimilated. God knows what kind of reception he's going to get when he gets home. Hey. L. Where are you off to now?” 

And Laurie would have informed him that he was off to find Lanyon and have it out with him, to suggest that half the training school could begin sending one another love-letters and invite the top brass to do their worst, what were they going to do about that, hey? But as he got his leg over the window-sill of their ground-floor bunk, Hugh was already waxing meditative. “You know, I have to admit I'm surprised he chose Hazell as the object of his soppy maudlin affections. I mean, if anything, I think most people assume that it's you that–”

And it would have been nice for an exasperated narrator to be able to say that it was good sense, caution and native wit that stopped him there, right there in his tracks. But unfortunately untrue, and it was in fact the fact that he was only speaking to empty air that halted him. Laurie was away off through the open window and running off across the open courtyard, putting divots in the green and showing the sod a clean pair of heels. Hugh sucked in a breath and shook his head, and counted himself well out of it. Bloody fool.

xxx

Ten minutes later, and unwilling admission gained to the senior's dorms and Lanyon's cube, maintained up until now in sole dominion and regal splendour – as these things went in the Vulcan military, much like an ascetic version of a second-division prep school combined with a civilised small country-town gaol... Maybe Laurie was thinking much the same. With his knuckles reddened from insistent knocking, and a frog in his throat that was making it tickle and scratch and distracting his mind from the fact that he'd had something to say, something urgent... Hadn't he?

It wasn't as if Lanyon was even looking at him. His serenely cold expression hadn't changed one whit in the moments since he'd allowed Laurie to cross his threshold. And now he'd simply resumed – packing. He was packing, and that simple fact provided Laurie with the adrenalin and the impetus to go on, to speak. “Is it true?” he asked, not as if there was much doubt in the matter now. But still, straight from the source counted for something. “They're firing you?”

The little pause was presumably intended to chill his blood, at the realisation of his own presumption. Normally it would have been highly effective, but Laurie was too fired up for that now. “As far as it's any of your business – which it isn't,” Lanyon allowed – giving him a hard, quick look. “Yes. If you care to spread the word, you might kindly wait until I'm off the premises, Odell. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a lot to do and very little time to do it in.”

It wasn't even a hint, and he clearly hadn't time or patience to accompany it with any physical crowding to get the message more unmistakably across. None of the normal cues were working on Laurie, and instead the rebellion he was genetically seeded with spilled out of him. “And what? You're just going to lie down and take it? You're not going to do anything about it?”

Perhaps he expected to be flattened, verbally at least, for the impudence. It would have been better than the complete absence of affect that was all he failed to provoke, at any rate. Lanyon didn't shrug, but he really might as well have done. And Laurie felt hope drain out of him as he watched, unejected but still egregiously unwelcome. This was half of the half-formed fantasies he'd cherished for weeks past now: admission to Lanyon's inner sanctum, reason to circle his orbit shyly, approaching cautiously and making himself known. None of his quickly repressed thoughts had played out like this, in the half-life he'd allowed them, though. 

Only Lanyon's physical presence was the same, with even that seemingly infected by a faint listlessness that his careful and precise activity couldn't mask. Still Laurie's eyes lingered on the close-cropped Brutus that all the Vulcan cadets liked to affect – mostly, he thought, in mimicry of Lanyon's own initial adoption of the style. Fair hair, uncommon amongst the Vulcans – although not passed down from his human father but his austerely beautiful mother, evidenced at parental interviews and school communal events – made him stand out even so. The spare regularity of his features was more identifiably other than human, no softness or spare flesh in it, and the blue of the eyes had a chip of ice as you might find in a peasant girl's heart in an old Terran fairytale. But the ears of course were the distinctive characteristic, and Laurie could have squirmed as he remembered certain middle-of-the-night romantic melodramas played out inside the confines of his own head. His own were probably red like fire just thinking about it, but the delicately pointed tips of Lanyon's own whorled shells seemed impervious to feeling, weather or temperature, ever perfect and ever an unvarying taupe-white. Laurie had allowed himself to wonder, a time or two, if he would ever find the time or the excuse to put his finger or his lips, just there, below the upper curve and around from the peninsula of the lobe, and if they were as acutely sensitive as they looked or if... He'd thought about _pon farr_ , as well, and how Lanyon's parents kept him home during the acute phase, as some of the more conservative sects held it necessary, promoting chastity until committed mating. He would be lying to himself if he said he hadn't speculated.

Not the time, at all. He coughed, and remembered he had actual business to conduct here. Serious, adult things, not a childish fixation serving his own perverse interests. 

Lanyon sighed, put down a crisply pressed shirt into an open case, and turned to face him. “Odell. You're interfering with something that doesn't concern you. I could put a rocket under you, or just let you career off on your merry way and cause havoc. But I'd sooner you didn't. Have some sense and back off: go back to your dorm, study for your intermediate exams and keep your nose out. This isn't your affair. I have other things to worry about, without tripping up over the destruction left behind by a melodramatic snot-nosed kid like you.”

It was harsh, and insulting. It didn't quite fit, either, with something twitching and uneasy in Lanyon's eyes, with the flex and repressed jerk of his hands as they picked the shirt up again and fiddled with it for no reason. Everything Lanyon did was entirely logical and determined by sufficient cause. He didn't engage in superfluous actions, and not just because he was Vulcan. 

Laurie knew in that moment that the game was in fact worth the candle. It didn't matter if he had Lanyon's approval, after all: only his own. “Well, I won't involve you, or as little as I can, then,” he agreed, dizzy and bobble-headed, excited in a way that made him feel distant from his own head, his own eyes. “I'll just confirm with you the story that's going round, to check my facts. Hazell – little toerag – hasn't been able to keep his mouth shut after you and he–” Laurie hesitated. “Well, nothing that would have got you thrown out, anyhow.”

Lanyon finally looked like he was fully engaged, like maybe Laurie was actually in direct physical danger as he stepped closer, with enough menace that normally even Laurie would have been silenced. Not now, though. He cleared his throat, tipped his chin up a little higher and met Lanyon's eye directly. “Except that you put it in writing. And not just time and place and _bring the lube_ , either. I understand there was some purple prose involved. You wrote him poetry?”

He wouldn't have dared say it, except to make the point that he dared say it. And perhaps Lanyon was perceptive enough to pick up on that, because his tense face suddenly relaxed. And he almost smiled, as he said, “And if you're not careful, then I'll recite you some of it. It would just about serve you right. Now, get out of here when you're told. Stop trying to get yourself tangled up in this mess.”

Something in Laurie stumbled over the reply, and seized up: and he felt the drying up of the occult impetus that had had him carrying on, speaking and acting by instinct. He understood then, first time off, that he'd expected, assumed a denial. Surely there had to be some mistake: because no-one would cherish any sentimental fondness for Hazell, who'd give it away for smiles and a bit of suggestive backchat. Not just a bit of relief when privacy offered a chance, but verbal commitments and hyperbolae he couldn't possibly make good on with the three or four interests he had running at any given moment. Not without moving to original Odonian Anarres and having himself a gunshot poly wedding in the communitarian chapel. Not Lanyon, anyway. Surely? (Why Hazell, some petulant inward critic snivelled and itched, too. Why Hazell, and if Hazell, then why not–?)

Well, evidently there was no accounting for tastes. But it still made no difference, or so Laurie told himself, stoic as the stone statue of the Starfleet founder in the cadet school courtyard. He stiffened his backbone, and his resolve too, and didn't drop his eyes one whit. “We'll all be involved, quite shortly. I don't see why the top brass should be allowed to get away with this, and I can swing a reasonable-sized faction at least to do something about it.” He hesitated a bit, at that, at the look in Lanyon's eye that wasn't anything promising. Then cranked the tension up a notch, and continued. “It's ridiculous that you can be keelhauled for something that they wouldn't turn a hair at back home, at the brother academy. If enough of us do exactly the same thing, then what are they going to do about it? Turf us all out, and be short a few gross officers when we should be ready for fodder for the war in eighteen months or so? I'll go, all right, if that's what you want. I'll go and start writing a sonnet to Treviss' eyes – or his arse – and stick it up on the common-room notice-board so that everyone can appreciate my lovely metre and choice of assonances and simile when I do. And when I do it, Hugh'll do it – if he knows what's good for him. And we both do it, the whole cadet junior year does it, human and Vulcan both, and then–”

The shove backwards he got was relatively mild, really. It could have easily been a slap, or something more tooth-loosening. But the expression on Lanyon's face ebbed quickly, replaced by resignation. And the hand on his shoulder was a pause for thought, if not conciliatory. He stood up to it pretty well, considering how shaken up he felt. “No, you won't, Odell,” Lanyon said, and the words were heavier than the hand on his shoulder. “No, you won't.”

Laurie didn't mean any defiance when he said, “You can't stop me.” It was a simple statement of fact, because there was nothing else he could do, however ineffectual it might prove in the end. And somebody had to do something. 

Perhaps Lanyon didn't consider him stupid enough to be looking for trouble, either. But just gave him a very searching look, from under fair brows and with a face weathered a little beyond his years. Then he seemed to come to some decision. “It isn't necessary,” he said shortly. “I'm not exactly looking to have it advertised – since my people aren't exactly going to be jumping up and down with pride and exultation. But since my career here is pretty much over before it begins, I'm going to transfer to your own place. I fulfil the basic entry qualifications, and with the war on they can't afford to be that picky for anyone with the boarding fees and bi-species status. Even given the kind of recommendation I'm liable to get from old Bones.”

Well. Laurie felt unpleasantly wrong-footed, and it was disconcerting to realise just how much a self-righteous fire had kept him fuelled up to stir up the troops until this point. Hugh had been rather sure that it wasn't even an option, after all... But of course, it was good news. More than good, in fact. “Well...” he said uncertainly. All his boldness and cheek, and suddenly he couldn't meet Lanyon's gimlet colourless eye. Which was unhandy, given their close proximity, which was also suddenly having an effect on his pulse and blood flow and complexion. “Of course, in that case...” It was rather powerfully borne in upon his consciousness that he was still there, littering up the place, taking up Lanyon's time and attention. Lanyon, who had been really pretty amazingly forbearing, all things considered, and absolutely without question had better things to do than give space and an audience to a bloody fool who'd been ready to set the place back on its heels.

And who was still standing there, really a bit too close for comfort, and with, well, a justifiably amused look on his face. Not that Laurie supposed he could grudge providing Lanyon with a bit of amusement. He could no doubt do with it, on a day like today. And Laurie had after all been enough of a blithering idiot to justify anyone taking a few potshots, and pointing it out with a laugh and a bit of derisory commentary. Suddenly it was imperative to get the heck out of there, and obstruct Lanyon in his exit out of the place and on to better things as little as possible. 

Not that he got the chance, though. As he made a move, jerked uncomfortably in the direction of the door and a quick escape from a misjudged attempt at rescue – what had he been thinking? - he was foiled in it. A hand around his wrist, and Lanyon smiling with an ease and purpose in his face that hadn't been there since the first moment Laurie had set foot over the threshold. That was what made it so difficult to resist, and so easy to fall back and still, immobilize under Lanyon's gaze, hypnotised by the pleasure of pleasing at all. 

“Don't rush off like that, anyhow,” Lanyon said, and Laurie thought that he probably didn't mean half of the seductiveness in that normally clipped voice, used as a tool and no more. It was unintentional, and he should really disregard it, and... There he stood, though, blinking and impressionable as any first-year fool, waiting for further instruction and direction, as Lanyon turned away and sorted quickly through a semi-ordered pile of books. 

“Here we are,” he observed, in under half a minute. He turned back around to Laurie, and had in his hands a slim navy blue volume with the uniform format of the texts set by the ansibular/warpflight examining board. Non-digitized, a carefully assessed symbolic expenditure of precious finite resources, like any old-form carbon-based book, a precious relic of bygone ways and hard-won knowledge, effortfully passed along. Laurie's own mother had given him perhaps three wood-and-leaf books in his lifetime: a signal of unusual regard, an aesthetic object. He couldn't repress a tingle at the thought of receiving so unusual and precious a gift from Lanyon. 

“I'm not giving you my contact details,” Lanyon said, and looked up swiftly, with a faint twist of the lips that might have been a smirk, amazingly resilient given the conditions. “Since you seem quite oncoming enough without being given any excess of encouragement.” And Laurie flushed up at that, but Lanyon was writing on the flyleaf again – upside down, of course, and if he wasn't giving Laurie contact details then what the hell was he doing? Apart from a personal dedication, of course, and the ridiculous thought of that was enough to curl Laurie's toes up, he wasn't sure if in pleasure or cringing embarrassment. 

Then Lanyon signed off with a flourish, and slapped the title page and cover shut over the drying ink, handing it to Laurie. Who might have opened it up to take a look, but Lanyon's eyes on him were much too inhibiting for that. “The Phaedrus,” he read from the title engraving instead, and drew his brows together. “We haven't been assigned it. I'm not too familiar...”

“Never mind. I only wanted something to write on, and I need to get rid of most of my things anyhow, certainly the books,” Lanyon said lightly. “Treat the words of wisdom I've left you as a corrective to the junk contained therein.”

And Laurie's hands clamped the tighter on the hardcover binding of the book, so he shouldn't be tempted to take a quick ganders immediately. It wouldn't do, after all. The moment gave them enough of a pause that he knew, after all, that he'd have to go. It had been a moment, and it was done. He'd always felt somewhere in the back of his head that they might wind up trembling on the edge of a moment more significant than this, though. Showed what he knew, nothing, near enough. Stupid mystical feelings and intuitions, and this after four months immersed in Vulcan culture. He was lucky not to get thrown out himself, along with Lanyon.

He should have known better than to even say it, but evidently his tongue was in charge of his brain and not the other way about, as it should have been. “You'll be staying in touch with Hazell, I suppose?” he blurted out. And could have bitten off said tongue the minute it was out, except too late. Bid time recall, except that you never never can, damn it all! 

It made him all the funnier, it seemed, and Laurie supposed he should have been glad, to provide Lanyon with some highly necessary diversion on a difficult day. Still, though, he wasn't altogether sorry, as Lanyon took a step back towards him, closer and more intent. “Oh, jealous, are we?” he asked, in such a tone that Laurie knew damn well that he wasn't supposed to take it seriously, was supposed to laugh along and take it in good part. He couldn't quite, though, and the moment broke and shattered awkwardly with his failure. He started on about three different openings before his voice made it clear it had no intention of staying true and steady and holding, and then his ability to look Lanyon in the eye went all skewiff too. 

Most situations could be placed in Lanyon's safe pair of hands, however, no matter how tricky. He just had to trust to that. Evidently the best thing to do, given this awkward set of circumstances and his own sudden inability to lend a hand on deck and man the bilge-pump, was for Lanyon to step a little closer. And Laurie trusted to that decision and relied upon his judgement, for what else was he to do? He felt his own lashes brush his cheeks, and cursed himself for a simpering mediaeval maiden. Hadn't he had quite enough, playing Viola in the cadet school production of Twelfth Night, forcibly double-cast after that kid Barnes had had the damnable good fortune to break his ankle? Suspiciously good fortune, in fact. Laurie had thought so at the time. 

“You really _are_ a bloody fool,” Lanyon said, and he sounded thoughtful, and surprised. “I'm amazed. I did credit you with some version of good sense, or at least the minimum of self-preservation. For a human you've always seemed relatively rational, not that I'm in any position to talk.” And like any bit of credit or good opinion from Lanyon, up until now – and for anyone in the cadet school, not just himself, he'd seen them one and all puff themselves up with flushed self-consciousness and hubris at the least word of approbation or agreement – it had its effect, could not be withstood. He flushed up a bit, and it must have felt warm when Lanyon touched a hand to his cheek.

Warmer than that, perhaps, when he touched his lips to it – and for a confused moment Laurie wasn't even sure what the moment had brought or what he was feeling, still less what to say. But there weren't quite enough instants to assemble his brain into some kind of working order. Before he knew where they were, the running order of events and that probably some form of coquetry or encouragement was in order, it was done with. And Lanyon had sharpened his grip on Laurie's shoulders. Then put him away from himself, only a symbolic few inches, but the symbolism was quite adequate to getting the meaning across. 

“You'd better get yourself gone,” Lanyon said, and his voice was admirably steady in a way that Laurie still had no hope of emulating. “I've got an appointed time I'm supposed to be off the premises, and a lot of packing to do. Don't forget your book.”

It was an unmistakable sending off, and Laurie even felt a bit relieved to have received it. Really, on the evidence, the less remaining time he had to make a damned idiot of himself, then the better. And the warning was needed: his hold on the tome had grown lax, what with all the emotional upheaval of the last few minutes, and he even found that he'd unconsciously let his hand stray. It was resting on the chest of drawers that had one drawer open, neatly mid-way through being denuded, in preparation for letting the book go, along with all inhibition and better judgement. Now he clutched it to him more tightly and safely. A keepsake would be something, in the intervening months. 

“Yes. Thank you.” He hesitated. “Is it... have you read it often? What is it about?” He got no reply: Lanyon had turned back to his bookshelves, and was examining a disk of holographic texts by a Terran war poet long dead – Brooke, a photo with a lugubrious expression and something rather consciously mesmeric around the eyes – with a crease between his brows. The look suggested disapproval at the fact of its very existence, let alone the temerity in finding, claiming and occupying a place upon these shelves. Surely they were reserved strictly for the utilitarian, the rational and the concretely, resolutely anti-introspective. 

Perhaps it was in the nature of a hint, but he still couldn't quite get himself out of the door. It seemed so unfinished, and what's the point of beginning something like that if you're not going to finish it? “I expect I'll see you again, then, next semester. At the Hainish Starfleet school... Do you think they'll require you to repeat your senior year from the beginning?” His mind boggled at the thought – Lanyon having to re-run through subjects and levels where his competence and mastery were not only well-established but dominant upon the entire cohort. Sainted Odo, they might even make him re-do his _junior_ year, and the thought was far beyond boggling. He'd be a year _ahead_ of Lanyon if they did that...

He was so busy boggling, in fact, that he almost missed Lanyon's clipped, reluctant reply. “I expect so. Don't forget to flatten the mat when you shut the door, will you? The corner sticks up, it's a health and safety liability.”

And that was a clear, if not crude dismissal. The reflexes of the social order and the dominant power structure were ingrained in Laurie sufficiently, that he was obeying them before he could blush or apologise – his foot over the threshold and all but ready to shut the door quietly. A little quicker, and he might have missed the throwaway addition to the admonition that Lanyon conceded him. “I don't know,” Lanyon said quietly. He still had his back to Laurie, but Laurie could feel a slight smile. “I've never read it. Live long and prosper, Odell.”

Out in the quad Laurie took a cool breath of late afternoon air, and felt like he was waiting for the world to stop spinning faster than he was used to, so that he could regain a footing and get some bearings, work out where he was. Mostly he was aware of one single desire, and it was a shameful one. 

Although not entirely unreasonable, he promptly argued with himself. The very reason that Lanyon was getting the old heave-ho was apparently his glib and over-enthusiastic way with the purple prose to an inamorato. (Hazell. And he was never going to get over that one.) Laurie himself felt he deserved all kinds of laurels and rosettes, purely for having exercised sufficient self-control in order not to break down and have a peep at what the heck Lanyon had written him on that damn fly-leaf right there under Lanyon's eyes. And if the essential reason for his failure to do so was the thought of how it would look to Lanyon himself – and what he might have to say about it – then well, what of it? He'd still refrained.

Now, though, there was no reason not to satisfy his... well. Curiosity, that was what he was going to call it. He just wanted to... Laurie stopped trying to justify it in his own mind. Instead, he took a squinting look up at Lanyon's window – because it would be horribly embarrassing to be caught poring over every firm loop and manly upright stroke, with Lanyon, amused, watching him from up above. 

Would it be a stanza of poetry, after all? A quotation from the philosophers of old Terra, or original Vulcan? Perhaps something original and packed with pent-up prose sincerity, mundane and yet meaningful beneath the humdrum rhythms?

He didn't waste overmuch time pondering and anticipating, though. Just leaned furtively up against the dormitory door, and opened the cover with eyes half-closed against surprises. Still, it managed to get the job done, though. Gnomic, enigmatic, and solidly mysterious, it wasn't even text, wasn't cursive, didn't contain a line of English, Old Hainish or Vulcan Vuhlkansu. Numbers, that was all it was: equations, diagrams and a couple of graphs. A dense little box of them, the print tiny, insanely neat as if the paper had just rolled hot off a press instead of being spat out with pen and ink. Transformations, time dimensions, non-Euclidean calculations and functions: all the head-crunching fine details that they weren't expected to do more than scrape through at fresher level, as pilots rather than theorists or engineers. 

And no dedication at all, which stung as much as his incomprehension. Just a sharp signature appended, blackly emphatic and regular, each upright stroke viciously and immaculately parallel with every single brother stroke. R.R. Lanyon, 2622, U.F.V.C.S. And this was the last afternoon he'd ever be able to locate himself that way in space and time, now that the cadet school had dispensed with him, found him insufficiently Vulcan.

Laurie slumped against the wall, and allowed his hand to drop, the book to close. In the purple haze of the distance, the airfield and the launch sites were dimly visible, and there was a training run scheduled right then. Four fighter pods hovered in taut readiness, a few hundred feet above the ground, ready to burn up a little atmosphere. Then with near-invisible speed, they were gone, vertically elevated without warning, blast or sound, out into space to follow the rubric of their assignments, to master the fighter pod skills that kept the insidious Borg advances at arm's length, that helped to keep each Hainish and Vulcan brain private and separate and whole, that blessed little while longer. 

And just like that, Laurie knew what the hedge of mathematical fog on the fly-page of a dead text was about. It was the scavenger hunt. Every year, the junior cadets were paired up to complete a scavenger hunt, with only the most abstruse and minimal information, techniques and equipment provided in order for them to find their macguffin and reach their goal. It was considerably more serious, as an element of their training, than it sounded – was considered to be an effective test of their ability to navigate unknown territory with a minimum of tools or pre-digested formatted data, and nothing in the way of simple instructions and _obiter dicta_ delivered in clear English. In this way it was purported to resemble actual battlefield conditions: where the only data available could be the enemy's own intel, coded and encrypted, not with the meat filleted out and summarised for easy chewing. 

Laurie had seen previous papers, provided as preparation for the upcoming ordeal. And they looked... a lot like this. He flipped through the book's covers again, and took another look. Yes, that was it. He drew his brows together in consternation, dismay. What was this, then, what had Lanyon thoughtfully provided him with? A cheat-sheet? 

No. It hardly seemed likely. Even expelled, exiled and made an example of, Lanyon was... well, the least likely person to subvert the status quo and advocate rebellion and underhand tactics. No. And if not that, then... It was a practice run, Laurie concluded. He shut the book with a slap of paper and board. Practice questions, problems, encouragement... A bit of tutelary assistance to help him on his way, to assist Laurie at least in passing high and matriculating from the cadet school with all honours, with praise and the pride of his mother. And his dog. Possibly his step-father.

As if he damn well cared, now. 

The lilac sky was darkening to purple, with the threat of imminent storm. It fit right in with his mood. The joke was on him: he'd at least half-expected hearts, flowers, declarations, subtle poetry quite clear enough for his subtle mind. Well, he'd hoped, perhaps. But seemingly no, those were reserved for the likes of _Hazell_. 

(Hazell!)

Well. Laurie shrugged, and stuffed the volume into the pants leg of his fatigues. At least he'd do well on the final assessment, and see Lanyon again with all honours, back at Hainish cadet school. It was a useful thought. Productive. It was utilitarian, and sensible, and...

He would have preferred a sonnet.

xxx

He'd taken it as a joke from Fate as well, then, of sorts, or alternatively as a warning against his romantic tendencies. He didn't lay the volume away in lavender, but gave it away, to the first person who expressed an interest: somehow preferred to do without the assistance on the scavenger hunt. Probably a good thing, to avoid such sentimental keepsakes and attachments. It wasn't as if Lanyon turned up at the Hainish school, next semester, after all. That final inglorious exit had been the last that Laurie saw of him.

Until now, of course. And in the alcohol fug and the welter of chat and shrieking, still they manage to cover a lot of old ground, chatting secluded away in their corner. 

“I kept thinking you must just be a few days late enrolling, held up at home for one reason or another. Until I gave up the denial, at least,” Laurie says carefully, now. Referring, of course, to Lanyon's mythical and imaginary Hainish-school officer training. 

Lanyon just laughs, pulls out an obscure brand of smokes from a world Laurie's never yet visited. “Did you really think my people would cough up a second set of OTC training fees, when I'd shamed them once already?”

“Did you?” Laurie asks.

Lanyon looks up at him, and harsh lines shade into a gentle restraint. “Not really. But it made you a bit happier to think it: and it stopped you stirring up the place and fomenting revolution, that wouldn't have got anyone anywhere. There were more important things to expend your energy on. We were at war, after all. And still are. The needs of the many, and all that. Worse things happen at sea, you know.”

“Scurvy and buggery,” Laurie says absently, then feels his face get hot. “So you just went and enlisted as a regular seaman? Worked your way into a commission?” he says hastily. Lanyon shrugs, spreads his hands. _As you see_ , it seems to say. 

Eventually they even get around to that last day, and the book, although Laurie is pretty damn circumspect about introducing the subject. He examines the remains of his drink rather carefully, as he comments, “I suppose I should have been more grateful – for what you wrote. I must have been an overheated dope of a junior: I think it wounded me a bit at the time.”

It catches Lanyon's attention more dramatically than he expects – enough to have him spill the drink he's leaning over to retrieve, though that's perhaps partly down to the couple trying to dance through solid objects without a transporter to assist them. He takes a moment to dump a sachet of sugar into his glass, but it seems more a diversionary tactic than anything. Laurie remembers vaguely that it's probably a bad idea, but who is he to lecture Lanyon about anything? Then Laurie gets a sharp sideways look, and wry expression. “Grateful for what?” Lanyon asks.

And Laurie doesn't feel up to an explicit post-mortem: he's surprised enough that Lanyon even remembers what it is that he's talking about. “Well, the scavenger hunt tips,” he says. “I should have put them to use: me and Treviss just trailed in behind the first half of the class, we could have done better, no doubt. Not that it mattered that much, given the complete cock-up I made of my training later on, the bust-up with my family and dropping out of Hainish cadet school. I think I was expecting more of an indulgent nod to my mooning adolescent pining, that's all. But I took it as a dire warning against romantic folly,” he says, light. “Which I suppose you were more than qualified to give.” It's as close as he feels like coming to so much as mentioning Hazell.

Lanyon's face has the constipated impassivity that Laurie's learnt to associate, in Vulcans, with deep, deep thought. “The scavenger hunt,” he repeats, and it might as well be the first time anyone's ever mentioned the concept to him. Although to the best of Laurie's memory, he came first, along with a terrifying full-blood female Vulcan Spock cousin from the sister academy, in his own junior year's comp, along with a silver medal from the Mapping Society and a discreet visit from an unnamed blue-gloved governmental body. “Is that what you thought it was about?”

Well, all your assumptions immediately _bouleversé_ , when you've been narrowly hoicked from the jaws of death and also had an unwise adolescent attachment ground in your face, Laurie thinks. It's a bit much to deal with, to be honest. He lets his jaw drop with an honest intention to speak: but it would help to know what to say, in that case. Lanyon laughs, a short unamused bark. That triggers Laurie's brain enough to speak, a bit. “It wasn't, I take it?” he says, because stating the obvious is his special talent. He clears his throat.

“It was a set of space-time co-ordinates. Recurring. You got that much out of it?” Lanyon says, and Laurie could perfectly well respond, 'Yes, Lanyon, please Lanyon,' to the irritable crack of the whip in his tone.

But he'd got nothing out of it, in truth, had barely bothered to look. It wasn't a villanelle to his eyes or his arse, wasn't a pink candy Valentine to destroy his pancreas, he'd known that much, and hadn't cracked the spine once he'd established the fact. The patience in Lanyon's sigh is more of a whip-crack than the real thing would be. “I suppose I wasted my time, turning up at a certain spot every six months or so, then?” he says, slow as someone who fears rhetorical assaults might be a bit complex for Laurie.

Clunk, clunk, go the tumblers, in the lock that's picked so that Laurie's mind can get to the booty of the answer. Fearfully slow, he is tonight. Fair play to him, however, he gets there in the end. “It was an assignation,” he says, and it comes home with a rush of adrenalin. It's the inevitability of the encounter you always knew was looming, waiting around the corner, the secret plan for your life beneath the dull conventional surface. The meaning and the mystery, the angel whispers that you'd forgotten. “The time, and the place. You turned up, every year? And I wasn't there.” Oh. He could absolutely kick himself. When all it had wanted was a little curiosity, a little academic discipline and garters-pulling and rigour, and he'd have had precisely the romantic thrill he'd been looking for with all the folly of his adolescent hormonal stew. 

And now he couldn't be providing more amusement for Lanyon if he had a fake moustache, a bowler hat and was juggling live rabbits. On one foot. Vulcans are reputed to have simple tastes in burlesque and variety. “Only for the first couple of years, Spud. Don't flatter yourself quite that much.” He gives Laurie an assessing look. “Well. Two and a half, perhaps.”

Then they leave it to a moment's silence, and just regard each other in the light of that revelation. “Why do it like that?” Laurie asks, finally. “You could just have said...?”

If Lanyon's eyes drop, and fairish light-brown lashes brush his cheeks, then.... Well, then Laurie's imagining things, because a skittish and flirtatious half-Vulcan hero of the junior year... Well, no. Maybe he's the more acidic for it. “Well, the joke was on me,” he says, like it's cotton candy dragged out of him, or guts on a mediaeval torture device. “All that hearts and flowers guff I expended on Hazell, and he was willing enough to play along. Not that he wasn't accepting tributes and billing and cooing with half a dozen others, when it came out. Projection and transference have a lot to answer for, that's all. If I'd known I'd bump into you here these years later, still trawling around with your heart on your sleeve and making cow eyes... When I thought you were dead meat on a lonely rock of an outpost, too. Look, Odell, don't look at me like that, or I shan't answer for the consequences. Clip your lashes decently or something, damn you.”

This little soliloquy is followed by an episode of precisely nothing – nothing significant to report, at any rate, but Laurie feels that this is largely because of a crowded and noisy potential audience. It's only a matter of time, now, and he feels the imminent future block itself out in his mind, promising. So they only stare at each other a little more.

“I didn't make it easy,” Lanyon adds abruptly. “I'd used up everything I wanted to say to you. It was there, if you actually wanted. And you could ignore it if you didn't, instead of being in a damn awkward position. I never had that concern with Hazell: he ate it up. With you, well. I left it up to you.”

“I suppose you still have that damn book,” he says. “Don't you?”

“I take it everywhere,” Laurie lies, glib and easy since it feels so true. Secret Vulcan mating rituals, conducted via higher mathematics, time, space and the forces of the universe, he thinks. It's probably the most romantic thing that's ever happened to him. He would not exchange such a courtship for anything involving sonnets and a balcony, after all. _True journey is return_ , he thinks, and perhaps he needn't regret anything so very much. “Wouldn't be without it.”

xxx

A few hours later, when Sandy's had a fruitless and profitless meltdown over some imagined slight, and Laurie's leg is still twingeing a good deal – worryingly – and he's still barely managed a few minutes alone with Ralph what with all the personal melodramas and drunken fights being played out... It would be reasonable to imagine that all the romance, by that time, would be knocked right back out of Laurie. Perhaps especially when a furtive and annoyed looking Alec finally emerges from his secluded and secretive application of nano-med procedures to his wailing and indignant partner.

“How's he doing, Bones? Nanites not doing their stuff?”

“It's worse that that. He's _not_ dead, Ralph,” Alec rejoins wearily, to Lanyon's listless enquiry.

Yes, it would be reasonable. But the imagination would be wrong.


End file.
